What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.<p>For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that <i>they</i> would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. <i>Of course</i> you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
Peter H Wilson had an interesting point in his 30 years war book that it's not <i>just</i> the appearance of firearms (musketeers in Spanish terzios fired in their own time), you also had to have a philosophical change to allow seeing a human as a cog in a larger machine; it's fundamentally an Early Modern concept rather than a renaissance one. And so you first see volley fire among the Italian condottieri and the Low Countries' militias, where you were simultaneously seeing the start of mercantile economies based on transactions between individuals.
What this article doesn't account for is the proposition that many, many historic armies did war bow volley fire, and we've never heard about it because they all got wiped out because it's such a bad idea.
When I was playing Medieval: Total War (both I and II), the bows and crossbows were very effective against an enemy attacking me. Now I wonder if the game modeled the arrow barrage realistically, or to align it with our movie-based perception of medieval archers.
After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities.<p>110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.
So basically, what he's saying is that the depictions in Hägar the Horrible of fighters charging on with arrow-studded shields aren't all that unrealistic. File under unexpected.
in the spirit that you only need one reason to be right, not five: the strongest argument against volley "fire" is indeed that holding a bow is exhausting and so a commander wouldn't tell their archers to "hold" before releasing.
The bow has a slow rate of fire, you can't hold a longbow in firing position for long (150+lbs of force required hold the drawn back bow), and you are only accurate from 300-800 feet (add 15% if in a high tower). That means charging calvary will reach your archers in 10-15 seconds and moderately paced walking infantry unit will be on top of your archers within 20-30 seconds of entering range. That leaves time for a few arrows. The bunched up, tight formations formed a reasonable defense - your outer troops would take the hits from the archers for the 20 seconds it took to get to the archers.<p>We romanticise the longbow because our frame of reference is a rifle. For modern people, it is hard to understand how superior the musket was to any bow. A rifled muzzle loader made up for it's slow rate of fire with lethality and a range of 350-1000 M. 1000M is not a sprint - it will take infantry 20 minutes, at a minimum (more likely 30-40 minutes). Additionally, at close range, a musket could tear through several soldiers...
I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all.<p>First of all, nowhere does he prove archers <i>didn't</i> volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.<p>But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it <i>does</i> cause.<p>I totally buy that <i>after</i> the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.<p>But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack <i>wouldn't</i> be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows <i>do</i> depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.<p>Am I missing something here?
Tbh, reading all this makes my head spin a little but I def love how deep some folks get into the nitty gritty of old school tactics - you think there's actually any lost technique out there we'll never fully figure out?
It seems like the archery gets disproportionately more “hollywood doesn’t understand how it works” coverage than other things.<p>Is that because I’m an archer and that’s what I see?
I disagree with the point about the word "fire". How can you criticize the English word used if historically they weren't even speaking English?<p>Scenes are depicted in English instead of the native language of the setting for the benefit of the audience (and budget), and in modern English it's perfectly okay to use "fire" as a translation for the act of loosing a bow, even if "loose" is more commonly used in archery.
Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.
I don't quite buy it. There's a line in Herodotus' Histories about Persian arrows blocking out the sun, and that implies a volley to me.<p>I don't have time to find a link now but if you google it you'll see.<p>(Incidentally, it's also in the movie 300)
There is something strange about the way this article was written. Besides that it could have been 25% of its final length, it repeats itself quite a bit.<p>I actually don’t think this was AI “assisted”… but that it should have been.
Question: What does this author think happened instead of the volley? Does he expect that archers just started randomly firing when they felt like doing so? Of course not. They waited for the order to start firing. So the first shots would, imho, constitute a "volley" in that everyone would be launching in the same few seconds. Subsequent shots would then become less coordinated, but that first wave would be a true volley. Then orders would come to stop/move/start, resulting in other coordinated volleys.